Director, Applied AI Engineering

ICW GROUP HOLDINGS; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

ICW Group in San Diego is seeking a Director of Applied AI Engineering to lead enterprise generative and agentic AI initiatives. You will own AI Platforms, guide a team of engineers, and partner with product, data, security, and risk teams to ensure scalable, responsible deployments.

This senior role focuses on platform governance, standards, and cost management while delivering high-impact AI capabilities across underwriting, claims, distribution, and finance.

Responsibilities

• Leads design, development, and production delivery of generative and agentic AI solutions across the enterprise.
• Owns AI Platforms, including Bedrock services, agent runtime, and MLOps pipelines.
• Operates AI Platforms as a shared enterprise capability for multiple teams.
• Establishes engineering standards for generative and agentic AI development and release management.
• Directs delivery model, capacity planning, and commitments to business stakeholders.
• Collaborates with data services, product management, and governance to ensure responsible deployment.
• Oversees production support, reliability, performance, and SLA adherence.
• Maintains capacity for research and evaluation of emergent AI capabilities.
• Evaluates new AI technologies and vendors; makes build-versus-buy recommendations.

Skills

AI leadership

Platform ownership

Cross-functional collaboration

Cloud & on‑prem infra

Tools

Amazon Bedrock

Bedrock AgentCore

ML operations (MLOps)

Model registry

Job description

Are you looking to make an impactful difference in your work, yourself, and your community? Why settle for just a job when you can land a career? At ICW Group, we are hiring team members who are ready to use their skills, curiosity, and drive to be part of our journey as we strive to transform the insurance carrier space. We're proud to be in business for over 50 years, and its change agents like yourself that will help us continue to deliver our mission to create the best insurance experience possible.

Headquartered in San Diego with regional offices located throughout the United States, ICW Group has been named for the twelfth consecutive year in a row and for the 20th time overall as a Top 50 performing P&C organization offering the stability of a large, profitable and growing company combined with a focus on all things people. It's our team members who make us an employer of choice and the vibrant company we are today. We strive to make both our internal and external communities better everyday! Learn more about why you want to be here!

PURPOSE OF THE JOB

The Director of Applied AI Engineering is a senior leader responsible for the delivery and operation of generative and agentic AI solutions across the enterprise. This role leads a team of engineers who design, build, deploy, and support generative and agentic AI capabilities that address business needs in underwriting, claims, distribution, finance, and corporate operations. The Director owns AI Platforms, the shared enterprise capability through which these solutions reach and remain in production, comprising managed foundation model services, agent runtime and orchestration, and machine learning operations. The Director sets engineering standards for generative and agentic AI development and establishes the operating model by which this work is delivered and supported. The Director collaborates closely with data services, cloud and infrastructure engineering, product management, and enterprise risk and governance functions to ensure solutions are well-founded, responsibly deployed, and sustainable in production.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Leads the design, development, and production delivery of generative and agentic AI solutions across the enterprise, including generative AI applications, intelligent document processing, conversational interfaces, and agentic and multi-agent workflows.
• Owns AI Platforms, including managed foundation model services (Amazon Bedrock), agent runtime and orchestration (Bedrock AgentCore), and machine learning operations - model registry, feature engineering, deployment pipelines, model serving, versioning, evaluation, and production monitoring.
• Operates AI Platforms as a shared enterprise capability, onboarding and supporting engineering, analytics, and data science teams as platform tenants and defining the standards and guardrails under which they build.
• Establishes and maintains engineering standards for generative and agentic AI development, including prompt and context management, evaluation frameworks, testing practices, documentation, and release management.
• Directs the delivery model for generative and agentic AI work, including team structure, capacity planning, and management of commitments to business stakeholders.
• Partners with data and AI product management, who own intake and prioritization, to convert the prioritized portfolio into achievable delivery commitments.
• Oversees production support for generative and agentic AI solutions, ensuring reliability, performance, and issue resolution within established service levels.
• Maintains capacity for applied research and evaluation of emerging generative and agentic AI capabilities, balancing exploratory work against production delivery commitments.
• Evaluates emerging generative and agentic AI technologies, foundation models, platforms, and vendors; makes build-versus-buy recommendations and recommends adoption when appropriate.
• Partners with enterprise risk and governance functions to ensure generative, agentic, and machine learning solutions complete required review and approval prior to production deployment.
• Collaborates with data services teams to define and secure the data products, semantic models, and pipelines required to support generative and agentic AI solutions.
• Partners with cloud and infrastructure engineering teams, who own on-premise and cloud hosting, to define the compute, hosting, security, and scaling requirements on which AI Platforms depends.
• Partners with financial operations on cost transparency and unit economics for AI Platforms consumption, including token, inference, agent execution, and model cost management.
• Translates complex, cross-functional business and integration needs into actionable development requirements, designs, and plans for engineering teams.
• Directs the team utilizing KPIs and data to inform decision making.
• Monitors and evaluates the performance of generative and agentic AI engineering activities and